Judges

The acting was not believable. The music was as if the composer just bought GarageBand and wanted to have every genre of music in the movie. The sound effects are out of place (probably came from a CD of sound effects) and are overly done. The only interesting character is possibly the barber (who tends to remind me of Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday in Tombstone). As a student of film, I would have turned this movie off in the first 10 minutes since I requested to watch the whole thing, I did. The dialog was predictable and anticlimactic. I am not sure if it was my copy of the DVD, but there were lots of breaks in the audio that made it seems like its on the editing end. The voice dubs were noticeable with no ambient sounds in the scene to blend them in. One thing that stood out was the sounds of the footsteps, which there were a lot of. The movie should have been called Footsteps, because that's one thing I will remember - the shuffling of feet across gravel, the creaking of the wooden floors as someone was walking across, etc. These should have been blended in more with the editing. According to IMDb this movie was made for $150k. I have seen better movies made for less. It appears they, and I mean the director, writer, producer and editor (which is all the same), were trying for a Firefly type of story (minus the space travel and foreign languages - which given more money they probably would have had in there). But seeing how this is Mr. Walker's first full length feature movie, I imagine he will grow from it and learn from the mistakes and improve. Not sure if a sequel is needed.

I can see where the film makers were going with this. But they never really reach their destination. It's supposed to be a homage to Spaghetti westerns albeit set in a sort of mythical modern time frame." But unfortunately it fall short in its attempt. It doesn't have that gritty realism that spaghetti westerns are known for. The characters are not vile and desperate enough like their Italian western counterparts. And, failing these two points, it lacks the humor of a successful parody. In fact it looks like they intended to make a serious film, but upon completion realized they had missed the mark so far that it couldn't possibly be taken seriously. Unfortunately, they also missed the humor mark by a mile. A whole lotta bad movie!

Avoid this crap at all costs. Bad script, bad directing, bad acting, bad editing, bad sound, and bad music. Get the idea? This movie tries to be western flavored, it's not. It tries to be hard core violent, it's not. It tries to present a fresh look at an old genre, it doesn't. The actors try there best, and my heart goes out to them. But with such inane material to work with it's hard to make something shine. To me this has all of the looks of a "fresh outta film school gonna set the world on fire" first attempt. Freshmen film makers often bite off more that they, or their budget, can chew. The best thing they can do is to take a few steps back, reassess what is possible, and work within their limited budget the next time out.

It's sad when you can see what a movie was attempting to do, and it is quite obvious that it fell far far short of the mark. Film students should take this as a lesson and a warning. Would be graduate has an idea. He wants total control. So he writes, directs, produces, his cinematic masterpiece all by himself. Usually, his concept is far beyond his budget. Usually he writes an overblown script full of every tag line he can come up with. Usually, he is more interested in the grand sweep of the story rather than on the nitty gritty of working with actors on individual scenes. Usually, he ends up with a movie that is feeble in it's attempt to create miracles on a tiny budget. Usually, he ends up with a series of encounters (we cannot do justice by calling them scenes) that feel like they were written by a 12 year old. And usually he ends up with badly acted scenes that fail to grab the viewer. When you look at Judges from this perspective you can immediately tell it's just the usual fare.

I really liked it. Sure, it had problems, but I wasn't expecting a major studio polished offer. Soundtrack was great, most of the acting was at least passable. I thought the location shots added to the tone of the film well. I like spaghetti westerns, especially "Once Upon a Time in the West", and Judges tried hard to capture that (and did an all right job).

For me, the biggest problem was just not enough development of everyone in the film. The 15+ main characters are very well-varied (especially the Afrodeesiac and the Barber), and beg for more screen time and back story, but with a 90 minute film, that's just not possible. Maybe that will be fixed in Judges 2. Looking forward to it . . .